Rackspace
Developer Blog

Posts written by Damon Cali

When building a non-trivial application, you will need to manage assets in the cloud. Servers, files, containers, load balancers, databases - setting these up and maintaining them is a part of your day-to-day work. You can use the Rackspace control panel to spin up a server. Or you can use the Rackspace API, and write a quick script to do what you need. Each of these tools has its ups and its downs, depending on your point of view and how you like to work.

As Ruby developers, we've become accustomed to doing a lot from the command line. In fact, there is so little that isn't done with a CLI (or editor), jumping over to the GUI of the control panel feels both jarring and limiting. So we decided to build rumm - a command line tool for working with the Rackspace cloud.

At Rackspace, our goal is to support our customers in any way we can. To move towards that goal, we decided to create a couple of tutorials aimed at beginning to intermediate Ruby on Rails developers. We hope that in sharing some knowledge, we will be able to help you better achieve your own goals.

The first tutorial deals with using the Rackspace Cloud API (via the fog gem) to recreate a very basic server control panel with Ruby on Rails. We'll explore some intermediate concepts like databaseless models, and introduce you to the basics of interacting with Rackspace with fog. At the end, you'll have the beginnings of a custom control panel. You should have a grasp of some of the gotchas, tradeoffs, and techniques that can be used to help you refine your cloud infrastructure management workflow.